Happy New Year! First of all, we here at TechTrax want to wish all our readers
a happy, prosperous and safe new year!
In last month's issue, we promised to give away some more software. And I'd
hoped to start this month out by telling you how much fun it was giving away
more goodies. But I'm finding this a bit difficult! As the new year rolled around
here in Chicago, we spun the wheel and got a number. Matched that to our subscriber
list, emailed the winner and gave them 24 hours to claim their prize. <Tapping
our fingers, waiting!> Unfortunately, 24 hours went by and no reply from
the winner. So we had to tell them we're sorry, but we need to pick another
winner. We did and sent another "You've Won!" email. Unfortunately,
this second winner apparently hasn't cleaned out their hotmail account, cos'
I've had the winning email bounce back twice so far. This winner has 12 more
hours to clean out their email and we will continue to try to get our email
through to them. But if we can't, we'll be forced to spin the wheel again and
look for a new winner. So the good news for you is that you're still
in the running if you're a subscriber to TechTrax. With any luck, we'll find
a winner who checks their email regularly and we'll be able to report back with
the name of the lucky winner.
As 2002 was closing it's doors to history, we were also busy making further
improvements to TechTrax. The first, and most exciting improvement is the addition
of Mike Glen, Microsoft Project MVP and highly skilled project manager, to our
growing list of talented writers. But Mike is not just a talented project manager
and MVP, he's also a proud grandpa, is a skilled pilot who served in the Royal
Air Force and is also a talented singer and member of a Barber Shop Quartet
group. Be sure to check out Mike's
bio for full background details, as well as viewing his photo collage, which
I'm sure you'll enjoy! Mike read our survey results and saw that we don't have
many Project users among our readership. So he's determined to teach us all
about project management and how to use Microsoft Project. Expert information
I'm definitely looking forward to read. So tell your project friends that TechTrax
now includes valuable information on Project Management!
We also broke out the hammer and nails and did a little reorganizing to our
master menu, as well as hung up a few new shingles. And those of you who take
advantage of our home delivery service to receive the Word doc version of TechTrax
will now notice we've added the main menu right into the Word doc. So, if needed,
you can easily get back to the online issue to look up menu information.
Take a look through our menu above and check out all the revised and new information.
Our About
menu now contains all the general, copyright and linking information, as well
as having the Offline Options information merged into this page, which was formerly
contained in a separate link.
We've added a new Associates
page. This page will highlight links to web sites who wish to display our logo.
Want your web site link listed on our Associates page? Just copy the TechTrax
logo link code from that page and put it on your web site, as per the instructions.
Then email us to let us know you want to share links and we'll add your link
and small logo back to your site where you've displayed our logo.
I'm personally excited about this and look forward to watching our list of reader's
links grow. It'll be fun checking out your links and learning more about
our readers!
The Training
page has been better organized a bit, and still contains links and details for
you to find great, inexpensive training for Microsoft software, in courses taught
by our skilled writers.
Our Library
is really growing and becoming a great source of quick information to find useful
downloads, code libraries, listing of articles series so you don't miss any
related articles and is the first place you'll want to check each month to see
if any articles have been updated with any new information!
As you probably know, our writers are volunteers who enjoy sharing their wealth
of knowledge to help other users. And many of them also make a living through
more involved consulting projects. To make your job easier when you need to
find extremely talented consultants to help you get through those daunting projects,
we've now added a Consultants
page. Although we still encourage you to read about all our authors from the
Authors
page, we've made it easier for you to find those authors who offer consulting
services to help you, possibly by building custom templates or presentations,
create custom programming code, help you get your web site designed and online,
design custom training courses, provide on-call, expert training or support
for your staff, or help with those nasty document conversion projects when migrating
to Word. Check out the Consultants page for complete details.
And finally, a page I'm particularly excited about finally having time to publish,
is our Feedback
page. Although you can always write to us at TechTrax@MouseTrax.com,
sometimes you might have some comments you'd like to pass along, but would prefer
to make your comments a little less personal than an email. At some point, the
urge might strike you and you might want to just toss out a few comments about
something you read that you particularly like, disagree with, have questions
about, think could be done better, or thought was so great, you just had
to let us know how much you appreciated the info! So we've made it very easy
for you to let us know what you think and no
need for an email address or reply
conversation if you prefer not to get too involved. You can just fly by, toss
your comments to us, and be on your way without any further commitment on your
part. Click the Feedback menu link and you'll find a form to submit your comments
and be done with it. However, if you do want a reply or don't mind if we publish
your comments in our Letters to TechTrax department, then you can select those
options, provided you include the necessary information. Feel free to use this
option when the urge strikes you—we'd love to hear what you have to say!
But even with all the work making these improvements, we still managed to put
together a fantastic issue for you this month, piled with lots of great information.
I hope you enjoy it! And again...all the best to you and yours in 2003. Peace!
Dian D. Chapman
Editor, TechTrax Ezine
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